The Cranbourne Gardens: A Tapestry of Australian Flora | SLICE TRAVEL | FULL DOC

The Cranbourne Gardens: A Tapestry of Australian Flora | SLICE TRAVEL | FULL DOC

[Music] way across the world at the southern tip of Australia in the bush lies a Timeless Garden that is unique for its Aesthetics diversity and [Music] proportions what makes this Australian Park so radically Innovative is that it’s not simply an open air Botanical Garden it revolutionizes the very genre and art of the garden itself all of Australia is related here cranor’s 25 hectares house a 20-year-old collection of plants emblematic of the continent let’s meet the people who’ve turned this place into an amazing hot spot of biodiversity there are six of them and they form the Australian Gardens Green Team Perry the landscape designer Edina the visual artist John The Gardener Paul the Botanical expert professor suan and Chris The Man In [Music] Charge we have 25,000 different plant species in Australia many of them and new ones are being discovered it’s a vast continent from deserts to snowcap mountains and Wetland areas and coastal areas areas so to have a a new Garden that Embraces all of that diversity in an artistic a new style that isn’t based on the European design Styles is really exciting it’s time for Australia to to have this and help us on our journey of of national development it’s not driven by botany this is driven by uh culture and art it’s an interpretation of a continent we didn’t want to copy um it wasn’t trying to mimic these landscape it was trying to capture the Essence the distillation of these of this landscape and so it’s our impression it’s our sort of artistic idea of what these landscape represent um and so we’re trying to convey to the visitors look at this landscape and hopefully see these landscapes in the natural environment in a new way from the red Hue to the most extravagant texture here’s the story of a work of art which sprung straight from its Creator’s Minds well when we arrived at the side this was a a form of sand mine so it’s just pure sand and what was here was what’s called a perched lake um the groundwater had risen to form a lake in the sand and it was quite pretty um and we thought is this the right experience when you come to the Australian Garden to have a pretty blue Lake um and we said no we should actually fill that in and make it a [Music] desert it is the iconic and quintessential part of our greater landscape it dominates our continent and we thought that’s the best story to tell for a visitor to come to a botanic garden about Australia it is a bit of a risk um uh there’s not too many Gardens that arrive at a huge red empty landscape that has very few plants in it but it’s important to tell that story it’s important to have a confronting view to say this is our dominant landscape this is what Australia is about it’s a dry red and mysterious [Music] continent we were inspired by um artists such as Fred Williams who is a a beautiful um Australian landscape painter and what he did is convey the color the form um the patterning of our broader landscapes in a very styliz and abstracted way this whole garden is in a way an attempt to respect and to love our broader landscape and you know want to inspire visitors to see our flora and our landscapes in new ways you will see on the right hand side of the sand garden are things called lunettes which are repeated sculpted landforms which are formed by um windborn Sands um edging up on the deserts and you’ll see that they’re parallel lines and that actually accentuates depth and and scale the other technique is the silver circles that you see there each one of them diminish in scale the further The View goes on and that gives a sense of depth even though it actually is quite a defin space Circles of light gray are scattered across the graphic chromatic red and ocar expanse the Japanese inspired discs dotting the incandescent s are formed by bushes called rodia Spence these desert resistant plants are covered with tiny salt crystals reminiscent of a bygone era when countless paleo Lakes covered the continent our visual artist edua drew inspiration from the Salt Flats to create a work of art the breed sand garden is a very simple aesthetic and we thought having the contrast was going to make a bolder statement so we’ve actually put a an iron surface underneath so that when it where the glaze peels back you actually get that iron color coming through and you’ll also we wanted to create a sense of rather than just being a flat surface creating a a memory of animals or wind that may have gone across it so here we’ve put some marks across it could be in reference to a kangaroo popping across it or a wind going across or something getting caught in it just just so that created a bit of a history to the ceramic work as well a lot of Australians actually spend their lives on the fringes of Australia and that’s where most of the population lives so a lot of people haven’t traveled into Central Australia at all so when I had the opportunity to go there in my late 20 and driving through the desert I didn’t know what it was I just I love the colors this you know the the red dirt with the really soft silver gray plants I was just very attracted to that Sensibility [Music] first the flamboyant desert then the bush both dry and verdant it symbolizes wild and Untamed forests it’s the other powerful image of Australia covering 800,000 square kilm of land from Melborn to Sydney in willowy forests of elegant swaying eucalypts and scrubby bushes this graceful foliage is found in the west of the garden along the eucalypt walk we wanted to contrast the openness of the sand garden with the immersion of the eucalyp walk you enter into the ukp walk and you’re immersed and covered uh within a very textured and dense landscape experience and come across a whole range of different experiences to relate to the various eucalyp forests that are found within the Australian continent the eucalypts are the quintessential tree of our Australian landscape any botanic garden that’s trying to represent um the Australian landscape has to have a very large component of um eucalyp within it um we really wanted to accentuate the particular qualities of the eucalyp forest and one of them is textures um the trunk forms of particular gum trees are absolutely gorgeous but then if you walk through what we call the peppermint gums through the uket W it’s another sensory experience this is where the smells of the eucalyp walk come into play you walk through that landscape and suddenly the aroma of the eucalyp come into play and you you think wow that’s a very powerful experience and it’s not visual it’s another sense this exceptional collection of eucalypts contains a design that didn’t go unnoticed by Perry our landscape artist tiny scrawling scribbles created by lari feeding on the bark of scribbly gums an almost insignificant pattern yet one that resembles a very Ure Motif in the conversation through the design process we said well we should actually have scru gums represented in this ukp walk and I can remember thinking wow that has a very beautiful pattern what if we actually use that pattern to create a pathway and so we were inspired by a very tiny little um pattern and made it a very large experience for the [Music] visitor the Australian Garden can be seen like a Japanese garden um in which they have represented their landscape in a particular way they’ve stylized it they’ve abstracted it they symbolized their landscape they’re capturing the mood of a country within 2 or 3 meters and that’s a beautiful aesthetic art form that they they’ve done over centuries and we’re just trying in a very humble way to do in a similar way to capture the beauty of our country what makes this Garden so unique is that it perfectly combines Australian history with the art of Japanese Gardens as seen in this bridge the lilypad bridge is another stylized rendition of Australian nature the bbong an Aboriginal word for The Small Ponds of water formed when a river changes course the dead pools house a myriad of water lies whose leaves are depicted here in an oversized fashion we’re defined by DRS and we’re defined by floods and so we’ve felt that water um had to be a very important narrative within the Australian Garden we’ve used it as a device um to take visitors on a journey from the Arid country where their water is scarce to abundance the co Coastal Edge so water is a way of taking people on on a journey metaphorically through our broader landscape but physically through the Australian Garden as [Music] well the northern display Gardens where we have a lovely water feature is in many ways at the end of the Journey of water it’s representative of the more populated Eastern Seaboard of Australia but on the coastal fringes they’re much more created Landscapes they’ve been landscaped uh developed changed they’re much more urbanized so the style of the garden reflects that [Music] contrast and what’s beautiful about those uh those Landscapes is when you see the fluid movement of sand over time um in this landscape and they have some very beautiful fluid shapes um also part of these Landscapes are often things called malucas which are paperb trees which are are here behind us The maluca Spits are forming the transition between the river systems and our Coastal environments we’ve chosen a melaluca because that is a typical plant one of the few typical plants that occur along the coast of Australia we’re not really in interpreting uh with this Garden an ecosystem as such it it is interpreting a character it’s a very modern interpreted form uh where where they’re pruned they’re being pruned like big Bonsai what the RO Botanic Gardens wanted to do was to showed off the plants in in different settings Australia was colonized from England and Europe and with that colonization came that whole design sense I mean you see in Australian home gardens a lot of use of European plants which is fine I have no problem with that but there’s a a great opportunity to utilize much more of the the the native Flora of Australia and really that was lacking one human has lived here for 18 years since the creation of this unique place his days are more of a delight than his nights so attentive is he to this paradise meet John arnut the patron saint of gardeners it is fundamentally a collaboration between some really interesting design and some some really clever horiculture and it’s those two things coming together uh look I think the garden is full of of plants which are challenging to grow for a whole host of reasons um with this amount of diversity you know we’ve got you know 2,000 plant species associated with this Garden so some things are going to be beautifully matched to these conditions and they’ll thy and they’ll be relatively easy to grow other things are a little bit more challenging and but that’s one of the beautiful things about this Garden it’s a garden where we can um take risks and we can experiment and we can explore you know the various tolerances of a whole range of plants from a long way away from them natural ecosystems I think that is one of the roles of botanic gardens used to push boundaries and experiment yeah these will need a a good drink cuz it’s a little bit [Music] dry what we have here is a group of grass trees zanthera species uh and xanthas are unique to Australia so they’re found in no other place as with a lot of Australian plants they’re they’re really well adapted to um surviving fire and you can see just here from the trunks that these these beautiful old old old trunks you can see they’re blackened by the bushire um and what what happens is the fire will come off the ground and it’ll come up the stems and it’ll actually ignite the the whole of the the canopy of the tree and after fire has gone through areas of the Bush you’ll see thousands and thousands and thousands of these flower spots almost to the [Music] Horizon an Australian vegetation is a veget ation of great subtlety its beauty is in its minutia the tiny little mirriad of things that occur there it’s not a Brash vegetation it’s not a Brash [Music] landscape the other particularity of this Garden is its eccentricity and especially the singularity of its varieties we’re still in Australia but 600 million years ago in the cold damp climate of a supercontinent gondwana the land mass included Africa South America Madagascar Antarctica and of course Australia when it broke up 160 million years ago Australia didn’t move which explains why its plant life has remained so unusual so you can see this curling out here and have a look in here the female produces the orange seeds so it’s a wonderful form isn’t it I can I can take that off and you can see what it what it looks like it does look like an old form doesn’t it s of a thing yeah wonderful this sort of garden is really about trees uh and and it’s about some other ancient things that exist in that sort of space such as the psych ads that’s some of the uh original Flora in the Ancient Ancient uh uh plant forms when dinosaurs uh R the [Music] Earth it’s about prehistoric plants and plants that we know that have survived for a number of years you feel like you’re in a tropical Lush Jurassic Park landscape on the other side it’s it’s kind of ethical and thinking about how we’ve treated the planet since we’ve come [Music] along we wanted to manipulate the landform the ground in this Garden gwana Was a Very tectonic ancient landform and so we’ve used Pathways um they are crusty and rough and textured so we’re trying to evoke the qualities of sort of tectonic plates in a very small garden experience so what I think I should show you is the the wool of my Pine and it’s such a fascinating plant is probably the last significant ancient plant to be found in this country and uh here here it is you can see the examples of the two different fruiting bodies and it doesn’t produce flowers the wami pine is part of the fossil flora and it’s fairly recently discovered in the Blue Mountain Sydney and so everyone that you you find of these plants is a clone of the other so genetically it’s it’s still one although it looks like a forest of trees and we don’t know where this is it’s a big big secret when I think here I am as a designer working with something that has been evolved for hundreds of millions of years uh that’s that’s a pretty astounding thing to think about the Australian Garden in a way was designed to convey a whole variety of stories one of the most rewarding parts of the gardens is actually its playful qualities how Children and Families have used this Garden in ways that we never imagined in the heart of the garden we discover another surrealistic landscape a maze but rather than opting for the tall hedges that traditionally formed dividers here the designers have used large segments of rock tucked among the stone is a genuine Cabinet of Curiosities cranor’s Pandora’s [Music] Box the weird and wonderful garden is a secret garden and it is something that you discover um as you walk through this Garden experience it was designed to host the really particular beautiful weird and wonderful Flor of our continent whether it’s very delicate forms or very sculptural um and textural plant forms and we needed a garden to convey the beauty of these weird and wonderful [Music] plants because of the the use of the stone where where we some times it Shades and has cool places sometimes it’s it’s very hot because it stores heat so what we could do within that sort of space is create a a lot of microclimates that’s a whole lot of different growing conditions which we didn’t have elsewhere you can see the B diversity it’s visually apparent there it has explained to you where some of these plants come from you start to understand how tough and how resilient a lot of this Flora is cuz ju deposed uh one against another can be something comes from an arid space and something that comes from perhaps a wetted alpon [Music] area this is the center point of the garden it’s it’s the the middle it’s just as dramatic as the red sand garden it’s just not screaming look at me look at me it’s screaming be in me be in me it invites you in it’s sculptural it doesn’t look like the center of Australia but it it looks interesting it looks mysterious it looks curious and because of that people come into it and and they get to see this whole other world sometimes it’s a little bit like being on the moon or Mars maybe but it’s because of this kind of richness of textures and Oddity that it kind of [Music] works at the heart of the maze stands a majestic Bottle Tree we can’t help but think of a Labyrinth of love with its concentric circles radiating out around a bungalow or tree often it’s an apple tree in reference to the Garden of Eden here the tree symbolizes longevity and peace Harmony between man and [Music] nature there are two distinct elements to the Australian Garden we have we have the garden here um but we also have the surrounding conservation Zone um and the the conservation zone is very much about biodiversity conservation and Wildlife um and this is very much about [Music] display Melbourne is a a large city and it’s getting bigger every year it’s expanding like many main capital cities across the World um and so the gardens here means that we are able to protect it into the future we’re getting surrounded by housing as the years go by that adds extra challenges for us in terms of how we manage that but it means that our role into the future of conserving the natural Bushland area is increasingly [Music] important I really hope that the structure that is here at the moment remains for many years perhaps 100 as the botanic asked Gardens arst to do I expect I’ll come back here as a grandfather and see the Garden in a whole different state of maturity of realizing the vision of the design it’s something that is an never ending Journey so even if I don’t work here for another 20 years it’ll still be a very um close thing within my [Music] heart

A south-eastern suburb of Melbourne is the site of an exceptional botanical garden, the Cranbourne Gardens. In this unique spot, biodiversity blends with the art of gardening to showcase an oceanic landscape.

The adventure started in 1995, when the landscaping firm TCL won the competition launched by the Royal Botanic Gardens of Victoria. The team took 20 years to recreate Australian panoramas, from the bush to the mangrove, in an immense sandpit. Their aim was not to copy nature, but to stimulate visitors’ imaginations: the walk takes you through stylized representations of many different environments.

The result is an astonishing botanical collection – 170,000 plants, concentrated into 25 hectares – that tells the story of the grandiose natural environment of the continent of Australia.

Documentary: Garden Design – Australia: The Cranbourne Gardens (2017)
Directed by: Mathieu Valluet, Stéphane Carrel & Pat Marcel
Production: ARTE France & Cinétévé

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